Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and BeliefPrinceton University Press, 2021 M05 11 - 328 pages Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. |
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... Religion . One of the most provocative arguments emerging from his book suggests that the removal of religion from the public space of discussion may be a construction that itself follows upon another construction : namely , the concept ...
... religion in modernity is the process by which , according to Asad , the weight of religion has shifted " more and more onto the moods and motivations of the individual believer . ” : 18 Within this description , it is already possible ...
... religious identity ) are observed , historicized , and analyzed , it is also evident that the book's main thesis — that conversion is a subversion of secular power - can best be grasped as an outcome of a particular historical ...
... religious minorities and relieve them of their civil disabilities . By undertaking the education of its subjects in ... religion were allowed to flourish without any interference from the company officials . So it might seem that civil ...
... religious group having ties that superseded national boundaries . When Anglo - Jews perceived that Catholic emancipation was not ... religion in general , even one as unpalatable to Gladstone as Islam . In any event , despite Gladstone's ...